Pages

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Taste of Home Cooking School

I love Taste of Home magazines. Flipping through the pages and drooling over those delectable pictures and even reading the recipes is a favorite past time of mine.

This is a new cookbook from the people at Taste of Home with pictures of every recipe and lots of good tips and cooking advise. As the title implies, it's like a cooking school at home. There are lessons on measuring such items as shortening, shortening, brown sugar, etc. It identifies different types of cutlery, cookware, and bakeware and what's the best use of each.

I tried several recipes - some I'll make again and others I wasn't too impressed with.

One I really like was My Take on Mom's Meat Loaf. It uses fresh mushrooms and turned out excellently. Cold meatloaf sandwiches the next day were supremely good. Another keeper is The Gourmet Scrambled Eggs. I served them for dinner with fried ham slices and fresh fruit. My husband and I thought they were especially yummy.

I tried two soups, neither of which we liked very well. Wild Rice Soup intrigued me because it was made with ground beef instead of chicken. Don't get me wrong - I love chicken and wild rice soup. After the first try, my husband suggested adding noodles. That was a big improvement. I also, sliced up some left over fresh mushrooms that I didn't use in the meatloaf. I am tempted to make this again, with some modifications, because I loved the ground beef and wild rice together.

Yankee Bean Soup caught my attention because of the addition of molasses. I love navy bean soup but this recipe was very lackluster, even with the molasses. Darn, I wanted this to be good.

The last failed recipe was the tantalizing-sounding Pumpkin Creme Brulee. My husband loves creme brulee so I thought I would spoil him. I followed the recipe to the tee and it turned out terrible. I thought maybe it was under cooked so the next day I baked it another 40 minutes. The taste was okay but the consistency was yucky so we threw the rest out.

Overall, I thought this cookbook was hit and miss.

** I received a copy of Taste of Home: Cooking Schoolfrom NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. No other compensation was received.

2 comments:

I have found that with the Taste of Home magazines, the consistency of great recipes varies somewhat. Some of the stuff I have liked a lot, and then other things have left me thinking that the editors didn't try out the recipe before adding it to the magazine. I often make substitutions and do things my own way, so I've been able to rescue a few, but you are right, for the most part, Taste of Home is hit or miss.